Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series VII

by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Julio Cortázar

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. Native American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Building on previous projects centered on the pedagogy of poets, and friendship through correspondence, LOST & FOUND SERIES VII breaks new ground to present unpublished and presently unavailable materials by novelist, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara; iconic poet-activist-teachers Audre Lorde and June Jordan; scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Jack D. Forbes, and letters between North American poet and translator Paul Blackburn and Argentinian in exile novelist, poet, and translator Julio Cortázar. While Cortázar and Blackburn forged their own institution of sorts, through a friendship that would help ignite the Latin American boom, Forbes, Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde worked in and out of institutions to help transform the landscape of our educational and historical horizons and expectations. For some years Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde all taught together in the City University of New York, the largest urban system in the United States, collaborating with activist students and other faculty to create new curriculum in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies. At the same time, Blackburn also taught part-time at City University, while bringing the vision of another world into American English, through his translations of Cortázar, a champion of the Cuban revolution and a writer of unparalleled influence in Latin America. On the other side of the country, Dr. Jack Forbes's vision of hemispheric Indigenous life was brought to bear on his involvement in the creation of D-Q University, the first Indigenous university in California, as well as the creation of Native American Studies at UC Davis, a program that would be emulated at other universities in North America. At the same time, his extraordinary and almost unknown poetry, featured here along with notable materials on his educational activism, presents a vision of Los Angeles cutting across race, class, and ethnicity that the work of all the writers in this Series help us realize.




SERIES VII

Audre "I teach myself in outline," Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha (edited by Miriam Atkin and Iemanjá Brown)

Toni Cade "Realizing the Dream of a Black University," & Other Writings (Parts I & II) (edited by Makeba Lavan and Conor Tomás Reed)

June Jordan "Life Studies," 1966-1976 (edited by Conor Tomás Reed and Talia Shalev)

Jack "Yanga Ya," Selected Poems & The Goals of Education (Parts I & II) (edited by William Camponovo)

Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortá "Querido Pablito"/"Julissimo Querido," Selected Correspondence, 1958-1971 (Parts I & II) (edited by Ammiel Alcalay, Jacqui Cornetta, Alison Macomber, and Alexander Soria)

503 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2018

About the author

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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